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Prehistoric wild dog found at iconic human fossil site, Dmanisi Site, Georgia, southern Caucasus
Oxytropidoceras posted a topic in Fossil News
Prehistoric wild dog found at iconic human fossil site Micheal Greshko, Science News, July 29, 2021 "Research reveals two highly social mammals crossed paths at Dmanisi 1.8 million years ago: our ancestral human cousins, and a pack-hunting canid." Lucenti, S.B., Madurell-Malapeira, J., Martínez-Navarro, B.,Palmqvist, P., Rook, L. and Lordkipanidze, D., 2021. The first hunting dog from Dmanisi: comments of social behaviour in Canidae and hominins. Scientific Reports. Published July 29, 2021 Research Square webpage Yours, Paul H. -
The following data taken from Nowak's classic paper shows the difficulty of relying on size to identify fossils. Summary upper carnassial tooth length of canids: LP4 Canis dirus: 28.7 - 35.5 Canis lupus 22.2 - 30.5 Canis latrans 17.6 - 22.8 Canis familiaris 14.4 - 22.7 Canis armbrusteri 26.6 - 29.5 Canis edwardi 24.0 Canis lepophagus 19.0 - 20.7 In some cases (the fossils) the sample is small. In others, (lupus and latrans) it is more than 100 skulls. Coyotes overlap with wolves, and wolves overlap with Dire Wolves, but in each case, a significant portion of the individuals can be allocated to the correct taxon by size alone. Domestic dogs are a mess, as they overlap with both coyotes and wolves. When you throw in the remaining fossil canids, size ends up being pretty useless as the sole determiner of identity. Usually some knowledge of the geologic context can help eliminate some of the fossil taxa. This is an old data set, and I'll run a similar analysis of Tedford and Wang's data and post that later.
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